Police face questions about handling of missing women case

May 8, 2013

Celebratory balloons and stuffed animals crowd the entrance to the home of the sister of Amanda Berry on Tuesday. / AP

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CLEVELAND — Neighbors say they called police on at least two occasions over the years to check on the peeling, rundown house where three women, who vanished separately about a decade ago, were being held. Police said they visited the house twice regarding two unrelated incidents.

While the rescue of the women Monday exhilarated and astonished the Midwestern U.S. city of Cleveland, police now face questions about their handling of the case.

One neighbor said she called police after her daughter saw a naked woman crawling on her hands and knees in the backyard of the house a few years ago. Another said he called after hearing pounding on the doors and noticed plastic bags over the windows.

Police showed up at the house both times, the neighbors say, but never went inside.

Police Chief Michael McGrath said Amanda Berry, 27, Gina DeJesus, about 23, and Michelle Knight, 32 , had apparently been held captive in the house since their teens or early 20s.

Authorities arrested three brothers — identified as Ariel Castro, 52; Pedro Castro, 54, and Onil Castro, 50. One of them, former school bus driver Ariel Castro, owned the home, situated in a poor neighborhood dotted with boarded-up houses. No immediate charges were filed. Attempts to reach Ariel Castro in jail were unsuccessful.

City Safety Director Martin Flask said Tuesday that investigators had no record of anyone calling about criminal activity at the house but were still checking police, fire and emergency databases.

A relative of the three brothers said their family was “totally shocked” after hearing about the missing women being found at the home.

Juan Alicea said the arrests of his wife’s brothers had left relatives “as blindsided as anyone else” in their community. He said he hadn’t been to the home of his brother-in-law Ariel Castro since the early 1990s but had eaten dinner with Castro at a different brother’s house shortly before the arrests were made Monday.

The women were reported by police to be in good health and were reunited with joyous family members but remained in seclusion.

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In eastern Tennessee, Berry’s father, Johnny Berry, told WJHL-TV that he spoke to her for the first time Monday night by phone at his home in Elizabethton.

The break in the case came when the 27-year-old Berry kicked out the bottom of a locked screen door at the home and used a neighbor’s telephone to call police. Choking back tears, she breathlessly told the dispatcher: “Help me. I’m Amanda Berry. I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been missing for 10 years and I’m, I’m here, I’m free now.”

Police arrived to find the two other women, along with a 6-year-old girl who authorities said was believed to Berry’s daughter. Police would not say who the father was or where the child was born.

Authorities would not say how the women were taken captive, whether they were restrained inside the house or if they had been sexually assaulted. Police said they were trying to be delicate in their questioning of the women, given their ordeal.

Cleveland police came under heavy criticism in a separate case a few years ago following the discovery of 11 bodies in a man’s home and backyard in another poor section of the city. Neighbors had long complained about foul odors, and the victims’ families charged that police didn’t take the reports of missing women seriously.

Two neighbors said Tuesday that they were alarmed enough by what they saw at the house to call police on two occasions.

Elsie Cintron, who lives three houses away, said her daughter once saw a naked woman crawling on her hands and knees in the backyard several years ago and called police. “But they didn’t take it seriously,” she said.

Another neighbor, Israel Lugo, said he heard pounding on some of the doors of Castro’s house, which had plastic bags on the windows, in November 2011. Lugo said officers knocked on the front door, but no one answered. “They walked to the side of the house and then left,” he said.

Neighbors also said they would see Castro sometimes walking a little girl to a neighborhood playground. And Cintron said she once saw a little girl looking out of the attic window of the house.

“Everyone in the neighborhood did what they had to do,” said Lupe Collins, who is close to relatives of the women. “The police didn’t do their job.”

Police did go to the house twice in the past 15 years, but not in connection with the women’s disappearance, officials said.